Google Interview Warmup is gone. Here’s what to use instead.
Google retired Interview Warmup in April 2026 — the old address now points you at Gemini. If you used it to practice answering interview questions out loud, the closest free replacement isn’t a chatbot or a question list: it’s a live AI mock interview that listens, follows up, and scores how you actually answered.
Free · no account · runs in your browser · audio is never stored
What Interview Warmup was — and what happened to it
Interview Warmup launched in 2022 under Grow with Google, originally as a companion to the Google Career Certificates. The idea was simple and genuinely good: pick a field (or general questions), answer real interview questions out loud in your browser, and get a transcript back with your most-used words and job-related terms highlighted. No signup, no cost, no judgment — a private space to hear yourself answer.
In April 2026 Google retired it. The Interview Warmup page now redirects to Gemini, which can chat about interview questions but doesn’t replicate what Warmup actually did — structured spoken practice with a review at the end. If you relied on it before interviews, you’re left looking for a replacement at exactly the moment you need the reps.
Worth being honest about Warmup’s limits, though, because they define what a real alternative should fix. It never asked a follow-up question. It never adapted to what you said. And it deliberately never told you whether your answer was strong or weak — you got highlighted terms, not feedback. Useful for warming up; not enough for getting better.
The free alternative: a mock interview that talks back
Job Lobster’s free AI Mock Interview keeps the part of Warmup that worked — you practice by speaking, in your browser, with zero signup — and adds everything it never had:
- A real-time voice interviewer. Not text prompts with a mic button: a live spoken conversation. It greets you, asks a question, listens, and responds — like the call you’re preparing for.
- Live follow-up probing. Give a vague answer and it presses — for the metric you skipped, for what you did versus the team, for the trade-off you glossed over. That pressure is what real interviews are made of, and it’s the thing no recorded tool can do.
- Five interview types. Behavioral (STAR), technical deep-dive, hiring-manager round, case/situational, and final-round executive — pick the round you’re actually facing. Add your resume and the job description and the questions get specific to you.
- An 8-competency scorecard. When the interview ends you see how you scored on role competency, problem-solving, clarity, specificity and evidence, and more — with verbatim quotes from your answers and your weakest answers rewritten so they land.
- Your measured delivery numbers. Words per minute, filler words per 100 words, pause time before answering, your share of the talking, average answer length — measured from your audio, not vibes. Warmup showed you your words; this shows you your delivery.
A session takes about three minutes, and you can run it again to beat your score. That loop — speak, get scored, fix one thing, go again — is what actually moves interview performance.
A fair comparison
| What you get | Google Interview Warmup | Job Lobster AI Mock Interview | Reading question lists |
|---|---|---|---|
| Still available in 2026 | No — retired April 2026 | Yes — live now | Yes |
| You answer out loud (voice) | Yes | Yes — realtime voice call | No — silent reading |
| Live follow-up questions that react to your answer | Never | Yes — probes your actual answer | No |
| Tuned to your resume + a specific job | No — fixed question banks by field | Yes — upload resume, paste the JD | No |
| Interview types | General + certificate fields | Behavioral, technical, hiring-manager, case, final-round | Whatever the list covers |
| Tells you how good the answer was | No — highlighted terms only | 8-competency scorecard + rewritten answers | No |
| Measured delivery numbers (pace, fillers, pauses, talk ratio) | No | Yes — from your actual audio | No |
| Cost / signup | Free, no signup | Free, no signup | Free |
Fair is fair: Warmup was free, private, and friendly, and reading question lists is better than nothing. But neither could react to your answer — and that’s the skill interviews test.
If your next call is a recruiter screen, practice that instead
Most interview processes don’t start with behavioral questions — they start with a 15-minute recruiter phone screen: walk me through your background, why this role, what are your comp expectations, where are you located, do you need sponsorship, what’s your notice period. Those logistics questions are where screens are quietly lost, and no question list prepares you for them.
The free Phone Interview Practice tool runs that exact call with a realtime AI recruiter, then hands you a hire-signal verdict — would a recruiter put you through — plus a logistics readout marking your comp, location, visa, and notice answers as clean or flagged. It’s also the closest rehearsal there is for the AI recruiters (HeyMilo, Ami, and others) that now make real first-round screening calls.
Questions
Is Google Interview Warmup coming back?
There is no sign of it. Google retired Interview Warmup in April 2026 and the old grow.google/interview-warmup address now points to Gemini, Google’s general-purpose assistant, rather than to a dedicated interview-practice tool. Gemini can talk through interview questions in a chat, but it is not the structured practice-out-loud-and-review experience Warmup was.
Is the Job Lobster mock interview really free?
Yes. The live AI mock interview is free, with no account, no credit card, and no trial countdown. You take a real spoken interview and get the full scorecard — competency scores, measured delivery numbers, and rewritten answers — at the end. Unlimited practice lives inside Job Lobster, but the free session is a complete experience, not a teaser.
Do I need to install anything or create an account?
No. It runs in your browser — desktop or Android Chrome, Edge, or Safari — exactly like Interview Warmup did. Click start, allow your microphone, and you are in a live spoken interview about a minute later.
Was Interview Warmup voice-based too? What’s actually different?
Yes — answering out loud was the best thing about Warmup, and that part carries over. The difference is everything after you speak: Warmup transcribed your answer and highlighted the terms you used, but it never asked a follow-up, never adapted to what you said, and never told you whether the answer was any good. A live AI interviewer probes your actual answer the way a human would, then scores it across eight competencies and shows your measured numbers — pace, filler words, pause time, talk ratio.